Food Sovereignty or Industrial Agriculture?

As national economies around
the world are each facing “fiscal cliffs” of their own, and as climate change
and environmental degradation threaten all nations, the crisis in agriculture
may be a greater threat and the solutions that are being proposed might make
things even worse.

The power of transnational
corporations, headquartered mostly in the economically powerful nations, is
moving the world’s people toward industrial agriculture and away from small
farm agriculture, the only system that will provide the people with what is now
commonly called “food sovereignty.”

Food sovereignty is a term
used by La Via Campesina since the mid-1990s to describe
the rights of peoples to produce their own food by using a system of
agriculture of their own choosing. Food sovereignty puts the people and their
communities, as well as their nations, at the center of food systems, without
regard to the demands or profits of a corporatized global food system.

La Via Campesina
is an international movement, which brings together millions of peasants, small
and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people,
migrants and agricultural workers in about 150 local and national organizations
in 70 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

In describing itself, Via Campesina declares: “It defends small-scale sustainable
agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes
corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying
people and nature.” The movement began just 20 years ago in Mons, Belgium,
started by men and women whose concerns were not given recognition by the
private and governmental powers that had begun to change the way the peoples of
the world provide food for themselves and their families.

Now, however, the
movement’s spokespersons point out, “La Via Campesina
is now recognized as a main actor in the food and agricultural debates. It is
heard by institutions such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations) and the U.N. Human Rights Council, and is broadly recognized
among other social movements from local to global level.”

If it is difficult for
small groups that try to offer alternatives to the way the dominant culture is
doing things in the U.S.,
where we have instant communications, educational institutions and the remnants
of a free press, to get a hearing, imagine what it is like for a movement like
Via Campesina to be heard on a global level.

The sheer numbers of
people in the movement should give them great credibility (of which they have
earned a great measure), but they are functioning on a global scale and they
have few rich and powerful friends to carry their message into the parliaments,
congresses, and corporate headquarters around the world. The world has many
issues that are more important to them than peasants and indigenous and fisher
people and their cry for food sovereignty.

But food sovereignty
should be of concern to those in the richer countries, as well, because they
are, indeed, subject to the same corporate food that peoples of poorer nations
are having slammed into their dinner pans and onto their plates. That is, if
they are being given a share of the spoils of land grabbing, at all.

Everyone should be
learning about land grabbing on all of the continents, but especially Africa,
Asia, and the Americas.
For a decade or two, governments, transnational corporations, and individuals
have been buying up land in countries where people still live close to the land
and, for the most part, still grow their own food, usually on small parcels of
land that they might not own with a clear title. In countries where there is
such a tradition, the land is held in a kind of communal ownership and the
people who have farmed on the land for generations believe that the land still
belongs to them, even though the governing structure has become a nation and
the officials (even when there is a loose structure of democracy) can be
corrupted or convinced that the “modern” methods of agriculture are better than
traditional and modern crops are better than those of the old ways.

A most recent example of
land grabbing is the project, ProSavana, an
enterprise of the Brazilian government and the private sector, in collaboration
with Japan, for a large-scale agribusiness project in Northern Mozambique,
where the rainfall is good and, according to Via Campesina,
“millions of small farmers work these lands to produce food for their families
and for local and regional markets.” It is these lands that would be made
available to Brazilian and Japanese companies to establish large, industrial
farms, to produce what they would consider low-cost commodity crops for export.

It is not clear whether
the export crops would be destined for Brazil
or Japan,
or whether they would simply be for the world market, with the profits ending
in the coffers of Japanese or Brazilian companies. Mozambican authorities are
not specific about how the people who now farm that land would benefit, or if
they would benefit at all.

What is clear is that, if
the land grab there runs true to form, as in other countries, the people who
have been farming the land for a very long time might be able to work on the
vast plantations at wages that are so low they might not be able to feed
themselves, their families and their extended families. They would be refugees
in their own land, without the means to send their children to school or to
seek medical care when it is needed…the most basic amenities of life.

Ostensibly, the project is
concentrating on “abandoned area,” where no farming is being practiced in the
region and they will be able to obtain long-term leases (in some countries as
long as 99 years), at fire sale prices: $1 per, hectare per year (a hectare is
2.47 acres).

Via Campesina
stated, “But land surveys by Mozambique's national research institute clearly
show that nearly all the agricultural land in the area is being used by local
communities.” The millions who depend on small farms for their way of life do
not want the large-scale monocropping of “commodities,”
such as corn, soybeans, cotton, wheat, and other plantings that are not for
food, but for the world market. The people in that part of the country do not
want to be employees of Brazilian or Japanese companies or rural laborers who
work at whatever they can at a (low) wage-paying job.

Commodity production in
other countries has produced disasters of large proportions and it has resulted
in the depletion of the soil and damage to the soil in ways that small farm
agriculture would not be able to accomplish, even if they intended to do so. Peasant
farmers around the world know this, because they have seen commodity cropping
in other parts of the world. The result of raising commodities, year after
year, is soil that is without much life after a while and crops can be grown
only by industrial and chemical intervention: Chemical fertilizer is necessary,
as are pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. And, new pests are encountered
regularly, largely because crops that spring from chemical intervention are
weaker than crops that are grown without such aids, and in conditions closer to
their natural state.

Those who live in
countries like the U.S.
are fed diets that are produced on an industrial scale, and many of them are
manufactured from corn or soybeans, which can be made to taste like many other
products. Even livestock is produced on an industrial scale, in feedlots and
confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

Small farmers in many
countries (think France, Italy, and Mexico) do not want any part of
this kind of agriculture, but they face the relentless assault of money and
power from the transnational corporations, which seem to get their way,
eventually. It is this power that Via Campesina and
the Slow Food movement that started in Italy several years ago are
fighting against. It is that power that is ravaging the environments of many
poor countries, especially when the monoculture makes full use of genetically
modified (GMOs) seeds and crops. These GMOs are patented and cost more than
small farmers can afford, especially since they must buy the chemicals, without
which the crops would not grow as would their own, more robust traditional
crops. Besides, traditional farmers save their own seeds from year to year, so
they do not have to pay for seeds at all.

Corporations like St.
Louis-based Monsanto, a worldwide chemical and seed company want to force the
replacement of saved seeds wherever they are able. Land grabbing companies and
governments are the likeliest places for Monsanto to do their work. It has
happened in the U.S.
About 85 percent of corn grown here is GMO and estimates are that more than 90
percent of soybeans are GMO.

This is all pure profit
for Monsanto and other seed and chemical companies of the world. They don’t
have so much as a shovel invested in farming around the world and yet, they
reap the profits, while peasant farmers and indigenous peoples go hungry. That’s
why land grabbing is so important to worldwide corporations. They have seen
that it works in places like the U.S. and they know it should be
much easier to do the same in developing countries. They send their agents
(often, from their government) to cut the deal, and then they move in. That’s
what is happening in Mozambique
and what has happened in many other countries.

A year ago, the news
outlets in the U.S. were full of stories of the “Occupy” movement and the most
important result of its creation: The nationwide discussion of the reality of
the working of the economy, in that 1 percent owns or controls the vast
majority of the wealth and income of the country, while the 99 percent of the
rest of us are left with little.

People who work the land
in other countries, like Mozambique,
know that something is wrong and they do not want any part of the industrial
agriculture that has wiped out small farm agriculture in countries like the
U.S. Rather, they want food sovereignty and they want self-determination in
other spheres of their lives.

Land grabbing and
industrial agriculture threaten the very existence of their lives, their
culture, their unique economies, their land, and their environment, in general.
Often, the deals are made in secret by their government leaders and the people
find out too late that they are being displaced and usurped. They are being
made aware in a more timely way by people’s organizations across the globe, and
they’re fighting back.

BlackCommentator.comColumnist,John Funiciello,
is a long-time former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who lives
in the MohawkValley
of New York
State. In
addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they
struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food
producers and land developers. Clickhereto contact Mr.Funiciello.